“I have lived in a very special world - a world of love and security; beauty and serenity; opportunity, adventure, and variety; challenge and achievement; and the appreciation of my peers. I have had a sufficiency of everything that I desired and a surfeit of nothing". Author’s note from Dr. Travell, in Office Hours: Day and Night, 1968.

This quote sums up the essence of Janet Travell, M.D (1901-1997), the first woman to serve as Personal Physician to the President.  Her office was the White House.

She was a born researcher.  She had the smile of a child and countenance of a great teacher.  (Sitting next to her at lunch meant a barrage of lessons and little time for eating).  
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Two quotes tell us of her essence.  A plaque on her wall read "It's Better to Wear Out than to Rust Out." She practiced until her nineties.  The other is “It doesn’t help to be afraid” and she wasn’t..

Her father, Dr. Willard Travell, had been especially skilled in the treatment of musculoskeletal and neurological pain.  She relates, “My father, not school, taught me how to think.  Over and over he pointed out the value of time and the importance of concentration.  He also taught me to focus my intention on things I did not know – new ideas, strange words, and my own mistakes.”

"What impressed me most was that she was thoroughly immersed in her world of ideas about pain, about nutrition, about skeletal balance and imbalance, about human physiology, about the therapeutic uses of cold. Her scope of interests was as wide as all of medicine and then some….But through it all, she never lost sight of the focus of all these concerns, the person she was treating." Robert Ruffalo, PT, DC, CCSP, Memorial Service for Dr. Travell, August 15, 1997.

Travell observed, “It's very hard to teach doctors that you look at every single person as something entirely individual and unique. You will then solve problems and you find that you leave your mind open and you get clues and cues - listening, watching, looking, and you say, ‘Oh my goodness, I haven't seen that in ages!"

Her observations concluded that trigger points involved both the red contractile and the white fibrous elements of muscular/skeletal pain.  She saw this as myofascial pain and suggested those trained in Trigger Point Therapy be called Myofascial Therapist.

"Her intellect has also been so clear and broad to inspire the greatest of academicians. Yet her presentations are so simple, down to earth, and pragmatic to provide the guidance to all health professionals and patients alike. Her sense of humor can fill a room with laughter. Her stories and anecdotes about her life left most awestruck and filled with joy. Her legacy will live on forever in the many students that she has trained over the years." Dr. James R. Friction, DDS, MS, Memorial Service for Dr. Travell, August 15, 1997.

Dr. Travell is most well known as President Kennedy’s personal physician.  He suffered from debilitating back pain from injuries suffered in the war.  A friend introduced them to each other and a very successful partnership was born. She also introduced JFK to Dr. Hans Kraus, a well regarded Park Avenue Physiatrist who set up JFK’s exercise program.

Dr. Travell advocated the use of a rocking chair to alleviate President Kennedy's back pain. In the process, their use was popularized among the public, who saw pictures of the President in the Oval Office sitting in his rocker. The President asked Dr. Travell to use her expertise in chair design and apply it to chairs in the Executive Office, Cabinet Room, Air Force One, and his personal home.  Rocking chairs came out of the attic. John Deere hired her to redesign their tractor seats which she did with a great deal of delight.

Unknown to Janet Travell, she was 1 of 3 clinicians—the others were Michael Gutstein (later known as Gutstein-Good and then as Good) in Germany and Michael Kelly in Australia—working “on three separate continents [who] simultaneously and independently published a series of papers in English” about myofascial pain. They all emphasized “four cardinal features [of the condition]: a palpable nodular or band-like hardness in the muscle, a highly localized spot of extreme tenderness in the band, reproduction of the patient's distant pain complaint by digital pressure on that spot [referred pain], and relief of the pain by massage or injection of the tender spot. Each author reported pain syndromes of specific muscles throughout the body in large numbers of patients. All three had identified myofascial TrPs [trigger points]. However, each had used different diagnostic terms” and was apparently unaware of the others: “the commonality of their observations passed unnoticed for decades…. Of those three pioneers, only Travell's influence withstood the test of time.”

The 2-volume textbook, Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual, co-authored by Dr. Travell and Dr. David G. Simons, notes that except for her years at the White House, “she has never strayed from her primary focus on the diagnosis and management of myofascial pain syndromes due to trigger points.”

Dr. Travell met Dave Simons when she lectured at the School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas in the 1960s. “David Simons became an avid exponent of the Travell concepts, and performed a yeoman task in surveying the international literature and in supplying the much needed neurophysiological verifications in the clinic and in the laboratory.” He “wanted to document Travell's work. He worked with her to write the trigger point manuals and tried to find scientific explanations for the success she was seeing from her treatments.”

Few would deny that she single-handedly created this branch of medicine
"The Mother of MYOFASCIAL - TRIGGER POINT Knowledge", Janet G. Travell, MD, A Daughter's Recollection, Virginia P. Wilson

Bonnie Prudden sought her out to alleviate hip pain, the results of a ski accident which fractured her pelvis.  Dr. Travell had a family farm in Sheffield, MA which was not far from Bonnie’s home in Stockbridge. They became friends and frequently visited and shared ideas.

Bonnie had learned about trigger points from her friend and fellow rock climber, Hans Kraus. She had also developed an extensive nationally known exercise program.  The combination of trigger point work and Bonnie’s exercise program was the birth of [the first educational institution] Myotherapy.